Zurich artist Walter Pfeiffer presents more than one hundred portraits of women in Cherchez la femme! Most appear for the first time, revealing another facet of his rich oeuvre.
 
 
 
He pursues beauty and glamour with sophistication, irony and wit, guiding viewers between reality and reverie, snapshot and staging. With simple means, he creates intelligent, classical images of beauty and bliss, touched by a melancholy awareness of their artifice. Elegant, suggestive and erotic, they form an encyclopaedia of desire.
 
 
 
“Intelligent and elegant, Pfeiffer's photographs evade classification, creating their own world and suspending viewers between being and appearance. They reject documentary photography's evidentiary gesture, its solemn intensity and illusion of a one-to-one rendering of reality. Yet they are equally wary of indiscriminately indulging the phantasmagoria of recent elaborately staged photography. Instead, these images offer utopian variations on reality, undermining blunt documentary assertion with a fairy tale's ‘once upon a time’.” — Martin Jaeggi